Soldered brass, 18.5 x 12 x 6, 2023.
Love Letter assembles a vocabulary of domestic and ceremonial brass: a crumb tray, a jug with a curling handle, a lidded cylinder, a ladle, a trumpet-bell funnel, a window grille, a cast arrow, a recumbent bird, and a turned baluster foot. These objects are soldered into a single tilted mass. Each is discarded or humble, and together they carry an unexpectedly complex burden of address.
The title sets the terms. A letter is flat, folded, and portable, and the sculpture’s backplane, a shield-shaped tray with a cut-out handle and an inset diamond aperture, reads as an envelope with its flap lifted. The contents are what a love letter conventionally holds: a heart-shaped swell in the jug body, a vessel that pours, a horn that proclaims, a bird that carries messages, and an arrow that wounds. The arrow, lodged against the window grille, is the work’s one explicit emblem of Eros, and it’s wry in placement: Cupid’s weapon lands deflected on architecture rather than lodged in a body.
The removable cap on the cylinder, set in the upper register directly above the bird, makes the metaphor literal. Beneath it is a concealed chamber, a place to deposit something that the viewer cannot see. The epistolary conceit is then structural. The work is a letter with an actual interior, and the sealed message is withheld unless the cylinder is opened. Handling becomes part of the content: to learn that the chamber exists, or to use it, one must touch the object and take the cap off. The sculpture secures its intimacy through concealment and consent. What the chamber holds is left to the owner, and the work is complete whether it’s occupied or empty. That indeterminacy is the point: a private message has no public content, and the sculpture can only model the conditions of privacy. The placement above the bird sharpens the reading, since the courier sits directly beneath the vessel it would serve.
The assemblage turns on a double reading of figure and interior. From one side, the clustered cup and plate forms read as a mask. From the other, the same elements resolve into a tilted room with windows, a funnel, and a spilling vessel. The sculpture is a bust, a house, and a letter in turn, and none of these readings cancels the others. Intimacy is rendered as a problem of containment: what is sealed, what is opened, and what leaks.
Formally, the piece descends from the Cubist and Constructivist tradition of assemblage, through the welded and soldered constructions of Picasso and Julio González, and more directly from the American lineage of David Smith and Anthony Caro, where found industrial parts are subordinated to a composition governed by balance, tension, and the resolved relation of parts to whole. Two long curved brass blades sweep across the composition, one descending on the left and one rising across the lower right. They work as pure gesture, counterweights that give the dense central cluster a diagonal drive and keep it from settling into an object-pile. Their spare planarity sets off the encrusted detail around them. The scale and the elevated baluster base place the work as a table sculpture meant for close, turning inspection, which suits both the title and the concealed chamber.
